Caisse d’Epargne Brand Guidelines: The 1818 Paris Savings Bank, the Squirrel & BPCE

Philanthropists, bankers and a passbook.

The Caisse d’Epargne began in Paris in 1818 as a private initiative to encourage saving among working people. French Wikipedia credits the idea to the baron Joseph-Marie de Gérando, taken up by two philanthropists, Benjamin Delessert and François de La Rochefoucauld. The first Caisse d’épargne et de prévoyance was formed in Paris on 22 May 1818 as a joint-stock company, its deed signed by twenty people, almost all of them bankers, the article says. A royal ordinance of 29 July 1818 authorised it, and it opened its doors on Sunday 15 November 1818, welcoming 28 depositors on the first day.

Its tool was the passbook, the livret, which recorded each deposit and the interest earned. The national federation of the Caisses d’Epargne says the savings passbook it created in 1818 became the Livret A, the tax-free regulated savings account still held by millions of French savers; French Wikipedia also says the Livret A was created by the Caisses d’Epargne in 1818. The federation adds that from 1881 its banks allowed married women to open a passbook and use their savings without their husband’s consent, decades before French law did so.

Growth was slow at first, French Wikipedia says, and the founders asked the state to take a larger part. A law of 5 June 1835 recognised the savings banks as private institutions of public utility, with the state handling the investment and guarantee of their funds. Savings banks spread across the country, each local and largely independent, and from around 1910 they began to group into regional “conferences,” which formed a general conference in October 1911.

The sources used for this guide do not say how the savings banks operated during the occupation of 1940–1944.

After the war a 1950 law, known as the Minjoz law, allowed the savings banks to lend part of their deposits to public bodies and local authorities, French Wikipedia says.

From hundreds of local banks to fifteen cooperatives.

For most of their history the Caisses d’Epargne were savings institutions rather than full banks. That changed in stages from the 1960s, when new savings products opened to all banks and a 1968 report recommended that the savings banks be allowed to offer current accounts and other services. French Wikipedia lists the additions: securities from 1969, loans without prior saving from 1971, current accounts from 1978 and bank cards from 1982.

A law dated 1 July 1983 gave the savings banks the status of credit institutions and a three-level structure, local, regional and national. Mergers followed: French Wikipedia counts 464 savings banks in 1984, 186 in 1990 and 35 regional banks after a law of 1991, with a national body, the Caisse nationale des caisses d’épargne (CNCE), created in 1992. In the 1990s branches across France were unified in the colours of a new red logo, with the same signage and layout, the article says.

The legal form changed again with the law of 25 June 1999 on savings and financial security, which made the Caisses d’Epargne cooperative banks. Customers can buy shares and become members, or sociétaires, of a local savings company, and those members elect its directors; the federation says this happens every six years. Each regional bank has a management board overseen by a supervisory council that includes employees, local authorities and member representatives. The Fédération nationale des Caisses d’Epargne, created with the cooperative status, represents the banks and trains their elected directors.

In 2006 the Caisses d’Epargne and the Banques Populaires combined their investment banking arms to form Natixis, listed in November that year. In October 2008 the CNCE announced a trading loss after risk limits were exceeded on proprietary trading, and in July 2009 the banking regulator, the Commission bancaire, fined it, French Wikipedia says. On 31 July 2009 the CNCE merged with the central body of the Banques Populaires to form BPCE; both retail brands carried on within Groupe BPCE.

Today there are 15 regional Caisses d’Epargne, from Normandie to Côte d’Azur, according to the federation, which says that with the Banques Populaires they are the parent companies of Groupe BPCE.

How French banks present themselves.

French banks tend to present themselves through a small set of strong signals: a confident wordmark, a simple symbol and one or two colours used with discipline. Green, red and blue recur across the sector. Crédit Agricole is sometimes called “la banque verte,” the green bank, for its farming roots, while Société Générale has used a red and black square since 1990, according to French Wikipedia. The result is a high street where a colour can identify a bank before its name is read.

Many of the largest groups are mutualist or cooperative, built from local and regional banks owned by their members, and their identities often carry that structure. A national mark sits above regional names, and branch signage, city photography and local news pages speak to a particular town or département. The same brand has to work on a village branch, a city tower and a phone screen.

Online, the pages follow everyday needs: current accounts and cards, home loans, insurance, savings and investment, with separate areas for professionals, farmers and companies. Mobile apps now carry much of the relationship, and app screens, notifications and onboarding flows have become part of the visual identity as much as the logo on a branch front.

Sponsorship gives these brands a public stage. Crédit Agricole has backed football’s Coupe de France since 1974, according to English Wikipedia, and Société Générale says it has sponsored the French Rugby Federation since 1987; culture, music and disability sport also feature. Annual and integrated reports complete the picture: long documents in which the group’s colours, typefaces and photography are applied with the same care as on a campaign poster, and a useful place to study how each identity holds together.

A beehive, an ant, then a squirrel.

French savers often call the Caisse d’Epargne simply l’Écureuil, the squirrel, after the animal emblem shared by the fifteen banks. French Wikipedia traces the symbols: each savings bank once had its own, often a beehive in the 1920s and 1930s, then an ant in the 1940s, both pointing to hard work. The first logotype, it says, was drawn in 1950 in a style inspired by the illustrator Benjamin Rabier, and the squirrel has given the bank a stable identity for decades. In June 2021 the Caisse d’Epargne presented a new visual identity created by the agency Carré Noir, the article adds.

The squirrel also had a long screen life. A computer-animated squirrel appeared in the bank’s television advertising in 2001, and in February 2011 it was retired from the spots after ten years, Puremédias reported on 10 February 2011; it stayed in the logo, while the agency BDDP & Fils built the new campaign around plain keywords such as “confiance” (trust) and “technologie.”

Sponsorship has carried the brand widely. French Wikipedia says the Caisse d’Epargne was one of the main private partners of the Angoulême international comics festival from 1976 to 2016, and that a foundation looks after the Belem, a three-masted ship bought by the savings banks’ national union in 1979 and open to visitors since 1985. It co-sponsored a professional cycling team from 2005 to 2010 and has partnered the French basketball team since 2014 and the French handball federation since 2015, the article says.

For a design guide, the Caisse d’Epargne shows how a plain animal emblem can hold together fifteen separate regional banks and two centuries of change. Compare BPCE, the group it formed with the Banques Populaires in 2009, and Banque Populaire, its cooperative partner. For this guide we use a passbook red, a squirrel russet and a warm linen with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Caisse d’Epargne’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.